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IT WILL BE NO NEWS THAT THE ACADEMY IS IN FLUX – THAT there is once again a ‘crisis in the university’. It is easy to exaggerate this crisis – but today, in countries like the US A and Britain, it has special ‘linked’ features. In this article I explore some of these links, especially their ‘political’ dimension. Politics affect the universities (and other centres of higher education) in countless ways – through budgetary controls, through definition of ‘national needs’, and in some countries, though political control over appointments. The students, transient and often bewildered travellers through the university system, can be the harbingers, and sometimes the agents, of political change. The universities, again, are bound to reflect or resist old social values – and to create new ones. There are new problems for university ‘governments’. They are all pressed to revise their rules of discipline – and some are faced with an internal ‘anti-intellectual’ opposition. The torments at Berkeley, the dismissal of Clerk Kerr in the aftermath of Governor Reagan's victory in California, the disclosures of the links between American student bodies and the CIA, the protests of British Vice-Chancellors over ‘public accountability’, the ‘sit-in’ in the LSE, the slogans of ‘student power’ – these are largely, and in some cases, wholly, political landmarks of the university crisis.
1 As reported in The Times, 10 March 1967.
2 Jacobs, H. and Petras , J.: ‘Populist Students and Corporate Society’ in International Socialist Journal, 02 1967, pp. 151–2Google Scholar
3 Something similar has been described by a British left‐wing group as ‘the liberal philosophy of academic freedom and the non‐vocational University’ which ‘ fused both teachers and taught in the abstract and unfettered pursuit of wisdom’.
4 Insofar as this ‘ideal‐type’ is ever attained it could only be at the expense of reality—and it would involve neglect of (or contempt for) many areas of ‘fluid’ human knowledge. The ideal type implied a more stable hierarchy of social relations (both inside and outside the universities) than actually existed. It also combined assumptions about the relations between ‘juniors’ and ‘seniors’ with a bias against the cruder intimations of ‘relativism’. At the worst it impoverished the imagination—and this is as serious in its dects as the elitism which, in Britain, it incorporated and fostered. At the best it invohed a respect for intellectual pursuits and criteria—even though the ‘hearties’ in the universities always enjoyed more philistine and less demanding relaxations.
5 Nisbet, R. A., ‘What is an Intellectual?’, Commentary, 12, 1965 Google Scholar.
6 Bell, D., The Reforming of General Education, p. 114 Google Scholar.
7 The long‐run bill, of course, is vastly increased if, as in Great Britain, there is a tradition whereby students have a ‘right’ to claim maintenance grants and an ethos which places high value on expensive residential accommodation.
8 These quotations are taken from the account of the conference published in Minerva, IV, no. 1, 1965, pp. III Google Scholar et seq.
9 The Observer, 29 January 1967.
10 ‘New’ overseas students are to pay £250 compared with some £70 paid by British students ‐ most of whom have fees paid for them by local educational authorities. There were many complexities in this controversy. The Secretary of State for Education and Sciences spoke of the need to reduce what he described as an ‘open‐handed, indiscriminate and rapidly increasing subsidy’: the action about fees was, in principle, left to individual university discretion but if they exercised this ‘discretion’ in a way contrary to official policy, their general support‐grant would be appropriately cut. There was widespread suspicion that the aim was both to save public money and to cut down the number of overseas students.
11 E.g. Bradford, Oxford and Cambridge.
12 Apart from other documentation from the student side(s) there are two interesting accounts by those involved or their sympathizers. L.S.E. What It is and How We Fought It, a pamphlet published by the Open Committee of the L S E Socialist Society and ‘Revolt at the L.S.E.’ by Ben Brewster and Alexander Cockburn in New Left Review, No. 43, 1967. I am indebted to both these sources: they name names (especially of their ‘opponents’) with zest and freedom. See also ‘Daffodils Unite’ by the students Rand Rosenblatt and Daniel Schechter in New Republic, 15 April 1967.
13 One curious development was an attempt by the Sunday Times Insight Team to adopt what they called the ‘only method suitable for an analysis of a dispute at the legendary home of the social sciences’. A questionnaire was posted to a random sample of to per cent of the students at their accommodation addresses: the survey received a 30 per cent response. 104 completed forms were therefore made the basis for an article described piquantly as ‘The Truth About the L.S.E.’ ‐ largely favourable to the demonstrators and their leaders. Social scientists ‐ inside or outside the ‘legendary home of the social sciences’ ‐ will not attach undue significance to such data. Even more remarkable was the Insight’s second survey also, we were told, ‘reliable statistically’ and conducted by 12 interviewers in three days of the School’s agony. It is hardly likely that a serious scientific study could be conducted in the heated, near violent, atmosphere of the sit‐in ‐ and the Insight column came near to straining sympathetic credulity.
14 The effect as conveyed, in advance of publication, to readers of the Observer was not unskilful: The pamphlet finds the charge of ‘racialism’ against Dr. Adams unproven. But it takes the view that a man who had raised so many doubts … should not have been appointed Director of the L.S.E., which ‘itself is now a large multi‐racial college.’ (Observer, 16 October 1966.)
15 The lawyer, Mr Louis Blom‐Cooper, set the record straight in a letter to The Times on 24 October 1967.
16 Any reference to a ‘foreign’ element in the student leadership or their inspiration evoked sensitive and angry reactions. The point can be overstated ‐ but the expert part played by some key figures from overseas seems well attested.
17 Professor Alan Day ‐ letter to The Guardian (6 February 1967). The Guardian (2 February) had observed that the students at LSE may have been justified in protesting against measures taken to prevent them from putting their views. Professor MacRae (6 February) replied as follows: ‘In fact the graduate student meeting, according to their handbill, was for the taking of “direct action”. Here we are presented with a very different matter. Also, while the students involved were not permitted to use the largest lecture theatre, the Old Theatre, there was no ban on their meeting on the union premises, where they could have put any views that they wished.’
18 In his letter to all students at the beginning of the spring term he had indicated ‘The School unreservedly accepts that there are wide areas of policy and administration in which the ascertainment of student opinion is desirable.’
19 The porter, Mr Edward Poole, had not been instructed by the School authorities to join his colleagues who were attempting to keep one of the Theatre doors closed. The Director is said to have declared that ‘no one should feel personally responsible but that this was the kind of thing that happened when meetings got out of hand’. (See New Left Review, May/June 1967, p. 17.)
20 Letter to The Times, 6 April 1967.
21 The students were not uniformly grateful to those ‘moderate’ teachers who either supported them, expressed ‘shock’ or otherwise intervened. See What Happened at L.S.E. and ‘Revolt at the L.S.E.’, passim.
22 Cmnd. 3342, 1967, P. 114.
23 Not is any other British university.
24 Parliamentary Debates. Commons 1965/6.723. Cols. 301–2.
25 Speaking on 3 April 1967 to a conference in London: see Staff‐Student Relations: World University Service, 1967, pp. 1–2 Google ScholarPubMed.
26 See Jones, Stedman, Barnett, and Wengraf, in ‘Student Power: What is to be Done?’New Left Review, No. 43, 1967, pp. 6–7 Google Scholar.
27 Published on 15 March 1967 at the height of the LSE turmoil.
28 Jones, Stedman, Wengraf, Barnettand, ‘Student Power: What is to be Done ?’ in New Left Review, 05–06 1967, p. 5 Google Scholar.
29 McNally, Tom, Vice‐President, National Union of Students in Staff‐Student Relations, World University Service, 1967, p. 53 Google Scholar
30 Beaver, Newspaper of the LSE Students Union, March 1967, No. 70 Supplement.
31 Adelstein, D. in New Left Review, 1967, 44, p. 89.Google Scholar
32 See New Left Review, May‐June, 1967, p. 7.
33 For example the account by MacRae, D. G. in ‘The Culture of a Generation ‐ Students and Others’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 2, No. 3, p. 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar et seq.
34 Recent and current targets of American student protests are fully examined in two (sympathetic) books: The New Radicals by P. Jacobs and S. Landau and A Prophetic Minority by J. Newfield. See also ‘Student Opposition in the United States’ by Lipset, S. M. in Government and Opposition, I, No. 3, 04 1966 Google Scholar
35 This is discussed with reference to student life in Britain by Wilson, B. in his chapter ‘The Needs of Students’ in Eighteen Plus edited by Reeves, M., and also in my inaugural lecture Sociology and Education (Nottingham 1965 Google Scholar).
36 A group of ‘situationnistes’ in 1966 captured, for a time, the Students Union at Strasbourg. Their ‘manifesto’ has been translated and widely circulated outside France.
37 The confusion seems irresistible. A recent academic visitor to China on his return told The Times (30 August 1967) that his group ‘talked to dozens of Red Guards and found them perfectly friendly‘.’ They were a bit like some of my students’, he added with a smile ‐ ‘young and enthusiastic.’
38 For a fuller account of Marcuse’s, theories, as expounded in ‘One Dimensional Man’ (1964) see my article ‘The Dialectics of Despair’ in Encounter, 09 1964 Google Scholar.
39 See his article ‘Philosophy and Madness’ in The Listener, 7 09 1967 Google ScholarPubMed. Dr Laings’s books are The Politics of Experience: The Divided Self: Reason and Violence (with David Cooper) and Sanity, Madness and the Family (with A. Esterson).
40 Wolin, Sheldon S. and Schaar, John H.. ‘Berkeley and the University Revolution’, The New York Review of Books, 9 02 1967 , p. 24 Google Scholar. See also Kristol, I., ‘New Right and New Left’ in The Public Interest, No. 4, pp. 6–7 Google Scholar: ‘The universities might logically be considered as new centers of moral and spiritual authority, and perhaps they will eventually become such. At the moment, however, they are themselves probably the most crisis‐ridden institutions in the nation, and are having the greatest difficulty defining their own reason for being.’ What, Kristol feels about American universities has relevance for Britain too.
41 See Langford, T. A.: ‘Campus Turmoil: A Religious Dimension’, Christian Century, 8 03 1967 , p. 173 Google Scholar.
42 MacRae, D. G., op. cit., pp. 8 ff. See also Shils, E., ‘The Ways of Sociology’, Encounter, 06 1967, especially p. 90 Google Scholar.
43 Wolin, Sheldon S. and Schaar, J. H., op. cit., p. 24 Google Scholar.
44 Glazer, N., ‘Student Politics in a Democratic Society’, in American Scholar, Spring, 1967, p. 216 Google Scholar; see also the article by Feuer, L. S.: ‘The Decline of Freedom at Berkeley’, Atlantic Monthly, 09 1966 Google Scholar.